It took the left about 10 seconds to summon lightning bolts of righteous indignation about President Bush's decision to file a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court against the University of Michigan's system of racial preferences.

"Once again today, the administration has said as clearly by their actions as anyone can, they will continue to side with those opposed to civil rights," intoned Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Jesse Jackson proclaimed Bush "the most anti-civil rights president in 50 years." The New York Times and Washington Post dismissed it as a crass effort to shore up the Republican base.

It's worth remembering, however, that the University of Michigan case was triggered not by some redneck bigot of the far right, but by Carl Cohen, a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Cohen is a former chairman of the Ann Arbor and Michigan chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was an occasional target of the infamous Red Squads, a frequent writer on free speech and privacy issues for the very left-wing Nation magazine in the 1950s and '60s, and a popular teacher who still finds Karl Marx "a very powerful thinker."

Cohen says he blew the whistle on the University of Michigan's blatantly discriminatory admissions policies precisely because they offended his liberal principles -- in particular, the constitutional principle that every individual deserves equal treatment before the law. "I really love the University of Michigan," says Cohen, a former scholarship student who came to Ann Arbor in 1955 after earning his doctorate at the University of California at Los Angeles. "I didn't want to become an adversary. I had chaired the faculty senate and knew a lot of the regents of the university. But in 1995 I saw a series of articles in the Journal of Blacks in Education examining admission rates for blacks at various colleges. So I went to my colleagues in admissions and asked what was going on here.

"I couldn't get any meaningful responses or data," Cohen continues. "Several people told me it was confidential. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 1995. I got back a note claiming that no documents existed to support my request. So I said, 'C'mon folks, there were lots of references to minority admissions in presentations the university was making.' So they asked for a few more weeks, and then a few more, and finally, in the spring of '96, I started to get the documents. It was shocking, smoking-gun type of stuff."

Indeed, it showed that blacks with extremely marginal academic credentials were being placed far ahead of whites with similar qualifications in a formalized, two-track grid system. The system has been scrapped, but "underrepresented racial/ethnic" applicants still get a 20-point boost in a system requiring 100 points for admission -- nearly twice the points for a perfect SAT score and five times the number of points awarded to children of graduates.

"I sent a summary of my findings to the president of the university, asking for an explanation," recalls Cohen. "He never responded. I wrote the regents as well, but not one of them even acknowledged it." So Cohen went public, revealing his data first at a campus meeting in the fall of 1996, where it was largely ignored, and then in an article in the neo-conservative Commentary Magazine -- a home of sorts for liberals who, as Irving Kristol once put it, feel themselves mugged by reality.

Only then did the full extent of the University of Michigan's efforts to favor minorities begin to seep into public consciousness and gain the attention of the local press. Shortly thereafter, a group of conservative Michigan legislators solicited names of rejected white applicants, which were passed along to the Center for Individual Rights in Washington, a public interest law firm that had successfully litigated a landmark case protesting similar activities at the University of Texas Law School.

CIR filed lawsuits against both the undergraduate and law school admissions systems that are now before the high court. Decisions are expected this spring.

There is almost nothing as politically correct on today's American campuses as diversity and multiculturalism. Some Michigan faculty members privately say that Cohen is on an ego trip. But he claims that "many of my colleagues feel as I do. They just aren't willing to speak out about it." And polls of average Americans strongly suggest they see a big difference between "civil rights" and the kind of preferences that are being extended under the guise of affirmative action these days.

In any case, Cohen says he doesn't worry about a backlash among his colleagues. "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just," the philosophy professor, quoting Shakespeare, repeats several times.